Talk:Character Creation/@comment-37.214.26.23-20190305174937/@comment-45075715-20200220141401
>> Your so called "combat beast" build loses its advantage in the long run. I didn't miss that part and I like the build! The idea of having a self-sufficient character with 10 in all sorts of skills sounds awesome. For "combat beast", that's a term that I used to see thrown around a lot in vanilla warband at least a decade or so ago. Maybe it's not used so much these days. I wasn't sure how else to refer to it except a build that prioritizes STR and AGI. Actually it's not even really a late-game combat beast since the focus is just to get enough STR and AGI and combat skills to have an easier time early on and win tourneys fairly consistently (especially Elacrai). After that the focus is on boosting companions and not so much to make them powerful but to make CKO knights and sergeants super OP. Yours might actually be more of a late-game combat beast since you're guzzling elixirs, and you might end up ultimately with more STR and AGI than me on top of more INT and CHA. My focus shifts to the most powerful CKO units ASAP -- my character takes a backseat at that point and I care about nothing but my precious and ridiculous CKO knights and sergeants at that point. Only part I thought where we might be conflicting a bit in terms of late-game powerplay ideas is CKO troops. Is there anything more powerful at steamrolling late game than super-upgraded CKO troops with 500+ weapon profs, noldor rune sword, 45+ STR and AGI, noldor bow+arrows, ridiculous armor, and netherworld charger or noldor spirit mount? My CKO troops were so powerful at least back in 3.7 that I abandoned the most upgraded Shadow Legion units because my CKOs made them look like complete weaklings and almost useless in comparison. They were so powerful that they made Shadow Legion troops with millions of denars invested look as weak as a village recruit in comparison to top-tier unit. They could take on demonic magnus one-on-one and still win (though in that case maybe due to horse archery -- I'm not sure they'd win on foot). And that's why I think even the combat-focused build (in terms of how we invest our level up attr/skill points) that reserves qualis gems mostly for companion boosts is arguably a late-game optimization still. Dust of twilight translates to stronger CKO sergeants and knights. But it's almost too OP. I made myself bored of PoP once I got to the point where 15 of my CKO troops were beating 80+ Noldor with F1-F3. It's arguably "too optimal" late game to make our CKOs so powerful reserving our gems for dust of twilight over elixir. The way I played was quite different, pumping STR and AGI for my character, reserving weak companions like Leslie for party skills, and what I'd do is gather lots of qualis gems and recruit every single companion available in the game into my party. Then drink DoT. Then dismiss the ones that don't get along. Then repeat again after I gather some more gems (I didn't do it with every single gem since it was tedious to recruit everyone to drink it and dismiss again). Then as the companions got DoTs and leveled up, I'd note which ones had the highest STR and AGI at the lowest level, and which ones had the highest weapon profs of which weapon, and make them the STR/AGI/prof mules. My milestone was more companion-related, trying to get a companion to over 40 STR, another to over 40 AGI, one with over 400 one-handed prof, another with over 400 bow prof. And oddly I almost always skipped being a vassal. I liked to capture a fief independently using empire armored crossbows recruited for siege offense/defense (or sometimes Ravenstern rangers), then fight to defend that fief until things settle down and rush founding CKO chapter since it's gonna take a long time to really upgrade my CKO knight/sergeant equipment and train their stats to epic levels I didn't even bother with right to rule until long, long after I founded my tiny kingdom (until I was seeking to expand the kingdom which was way, way, way after I founded it and not until my CKO troops were super powerful) -- I was okay with factions declaring war on my tiny kingdom left and right for a while and playing frantic siege defense (or even abandon my garrison if too large of an army was heading my way, let them capture and then retake after they leave). Very often I had my own kingdom before day 30 and sometimes as early as day 10 (in these cases I'd look for the weakest castle on the map to capture with a small number of mid-tier ranged troops and sometimes get really lucky finding a super weak garrison -- then race to villages fratically recruiting whomever to fill my garrison ASAP to discourage being attacked). >> You seem rather new to PoP. You'll get better with time, I'm sure of it ;) I've actually been playing PoP and other mods for over ten years -- and PoP actively with maybe over 5,000 hours invested (but mostly back in 3.7). I've gotten to points of laughing at Noldor and taking out over 1,000+ armies with 15 units. But I've never quite got the hang of hitting an enemy with a bow from like 300+ yards away without at least two shots (I need the first shot to miss to figure out how to compensate vertically in aim for the second). I'm kinda old and I don't think I'll ever develop those kinds of motor skills perfectly. I can really find ways to exploit mods late game and steamroll but not so much as a result of motor player skills or being the most brilliant commander -- more like just finding the most ridiculously overpowered troops and combinations that make it a no-brainer to steamroll everything. In PoP I found my ridiculously OP angle with CKO units (although not immediately -- I really had to experiment endlessly to find the best combination of equipment in the hands of AI control and also get my companion stats and profs to ridiculously high levels and train them). I do impose some self-restrictions that might make things harder. I'm not a fan of tab-retreating in a battlefield to choose an optimal battlefield, for example. I don't mind cheesing the AI but something about doing things like tab-retreating to reload battlefields and swap them out magically starts to feel more like cheating to me than cheesing (not saying people doing this are cheating -- I suspect we all have personal prefs about the restrictions we want to impose on ourselves to make the game more difficult). Also play full damage and I don't play realistic but the only time I save-scum is in the presence of bugs or if I impatiently ctrl-spaced to speed up travel times and ran into a dread legion army or something with low-level character that I could have easily avoided if I didn't impatiently ctrl-space to speed up travel times. I don't reload if I get captured prisoner in normal circumstances or get a bad roll or win junk in Elacrai or lose a tourney or anything like that. I also like to play it super safe! I might sound like I suck more than I do since I don't like to grind Vanskerry Raiders so often, e.g. But I still win far more often than I lose to them even with level 3 character with crap horse and bow. The problem is that, every now and then in a blue moon, I'll catch a stray axe or javelin to the face, and I hate losing. This might only happen once every 50 battles, and that's still way too often for my sanity! Actually I almost never, ever lose a single battle if I select my battles carefully. I do lose a tournament every now and then, especially Elacrai, but I hardly ever lose battles and just one loss and being taken prisoner is often enough to make me rage quit and want to start a new character all over again (I've probably created over several hundred new characters in PoP and have many backup folders of saves because they don't fit anywhere close to 9 save slots). So I really only like to engage in battles where I feel like I have a near 100% chance of winning. 90% is not be good enough for me -- losing 1/10th of the time is losing way too often! I'll avoid the battle until I feel like I have at least 99.9% chance of success. I am a game developer by trade and get the most fun these days not immersing myself in the game to the extent of a normal player but trying to reverse engineer it and figure out how it works. I make excuses with the hours and hours I pour into games as a form of "research" (although this is not entirely a lie). So I don't actually look up damage formulas or too many engine implementation details. That would ruin a lot of my fun of trying to figure out how the engine works and formulate conjectures about it and test those conjectures (this prevents me from thinking too much like a gamedev and more like a player). So I might seem a bit noob because I refuse to look into the code and the nittiest-gritty implementation details of the engine and prefer to operate on conjecture formed mostly from playing the game (which could be inaccurate, but I'm always trying to make educated guess and correct my mistaken assumptions). A lot of my fun is doing that but it's kind of "cheating" to me to look up the precise coding details. If I take it to the point of looking at the game's source code, it will pretty much kill all the fun the game has to offer to me. For the first few thousand hours or so I played this mod, I never looked at a wiki like this or powerpaying guides or anything like that. I started not even knowing what a qualis gem was, or how to found a KO or CKO chapter, and tried to play the mod like vanilla and learned the hard way that this isn't a good way to play. :-D A lot of people now seem to arrive at the consensus that Shadow Legion is one of the most effective KOs and I agree, but I didn't know that in advance. I arrived at the same conclusion through trying almost every KO. And I prefer it that way mostly. I already feel like I know a bit too much looking at this wiki, although I've poured so much time into the game already and in a different kind of phase/mood. Now I've switched more to sort of "theorizing" mode. :-D But I might have some big gaps in knowledge as a result of mostly formulating my thoughts on the game alone in this way without looking at guides and also as a result of not having played the mod like a fantatic since 3.7.